Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr.W----' 'I should say so.

Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.' I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners.

They always hated anybody who had the name of being careless, and injuring things.
I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief.

I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.

Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up.